i like
to think that on
the flower you gave me when we
loved

            the far-
departed mouth sweetly-saluted
lingers.
              if one marvel

seeing the hunger of my
lips for a dead thing,
i shall instruct
him silently with becoming

steps to seek
your face       and i
entreat,by certain foolish perfect
hours

          dead too,
if that he come receive
him as your lover sumptuously
being

kind
          because i trust him to
your grace,and for
in his own land

he is called death.

Translated from Portuguese by John Keene

Time
is an essence
I carry within me
Time and its strands
They've been coiled inside me since my navel was knotted
It has as its complementary counterpart
The space between time and its options
Time, lord of the hours
reigns sovereign
Subtly, on a silver cord
People don't kill time
He is the killer.

^{translated from the German by Edward Snow}

Again and again, even though we know love’s landscape
and the little churchyard with its lamenting names
and the terrible reticent gorge in which the others
end: again and again the two of us walk out together
under the ancient trees, lay ourselves down again and again
among the flowers, and look up into the sky.

Once you were always calling me,
Calling me when I could not answer,
Urging me where I could not follow—
So that I wished I had been born without desire,
As a stone.

But now many days you have left me.
And in the silence I have learned your meaning.

For a part of me is gone when you are gone;
I am less
And the world is less.

O let me have my longing back again!
Now gladly I will bear it;
Gladly I will hold it to me,
Though without release;
Always.

For what would be the pride of the sun itself
With its light gone?
O kindle me again, desire.
Return to me.
Return.

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. The desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a little and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

Under the wide and starry sky,
    Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
    And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
    Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
    And the hunter home from the hill.

un-shaken, moving un-restricted through the blank season, counting the dead, counting the days, counting heart beats, back to worms, back to dustvback to this un-necessary burden, sometimes in terror, sometimes a reversal crushed beneath another categorical persistence, another dream creature who does not speak.

this is what death is, everything that has ever been seen, everything that has ever been done, will have been done and still nowhere is anywhere for nothing moving towards un-becoming, greased for passage down a pipe, trickling down the throat, against the will preserved, well built lonely insistence on column willing, to be a real body in a real existence, around other bodies gathered up for dead.

I had not known before
    Forever was so long a word.
The slow stroke of the clock of time
    I had not heard.

‘Tis hard to learn so late;
    It seems no sad heart really learns,
But hopes and trusts and doubts and fears,
    And bleeds and burns.

The night is not all dark,
    Nor is the day all it seems,
But each may bring me this relief—
    My dreams and dreams.

I had not known before
    That Never was so sad a word,
So wrap me in forgetfulness—
     I have not heard.